I manage a portfolio of industrial chemical products (adhesives, sealants, edge banding materials) across EU markets. My day involves technical advisory to sales teams, handling warranty claims, writing product documentation, coordinating with manufacturers, and a fair amount of travelling to meet customers, our sales and distributors face to face. I’ve been thinking about when exactly a job like mine becomes replaceable, and I can’t land on a clean answer. The case for “sooner than you think”: I used to work for the biggest chemical distributor in the world. Product managers there spent a huge part of their time essentially buying and selling commodities - checking SAP codes, processing purchase orders, managing pricing across thousands of SKUs. That part of the job is already begging to be automated. An AI system with ERP integration could manage that workload better than a human, at any hour, across every market simultaneously. The case for “not yet”: AI customer service has been a visible disaster with many showcases (as far as I can see). The moment a situation gets slightly outside the script (a non-standard claim, an angry customer, a technical edge case) - it collapses. A siginificant chunk of my job is edge cases (the Gauss curve is rather flat in the middle). Every customer problem is specific, every application environment is different, and the relationship component is real. I travel. But the middle of the Gauss curve still takes up significant part, so there is still a potential to reduce a team of 4-5 of me to just 1 to take care of the edge cases, and leave the rest for the silicon brain. So I’m curious. Especially those of you who work in B2B, manufacturing, or technical sales adjacent roles: Do you think about this? And what’s your honest read on my and your timelines? submitted by /u/Any-Explanation-9275
Originally posted by u/Any-Explanation-9275 on r/ArtificialInteligence
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